The Tarot Channel

Interview With Patrick Valenza - Creator of the Deviant Moon Tarot

I had the great pleasure of interviewing artist Patrick Valenza, creator of the much-anticipated Deviant Moon Tarot which should be out within the next few months according to my contact at U.S. Games.

Janet: Patrick, I just have to ask: are you a water sign, by any chance?

Patrick: Yes, Pisces.  Better yet, I am born on the "Ides of March".

Janet: Well Happy Belated Birthday to you!

Patrick, tell me a bit about yourself. Where do you live? What are your passions?

Patrick: I was born and raised on Long Island, NY.  As a child, I always saw the melancholy side of life.  I believe I came into the world with some kind of experience, which eventually shaped my persona in the years that followed.  My childhood imagination was very vivid.  I would constantly create stories and characters based on the shadowy images of my “past life”. 

Most of the visions included a murderous harlequin or a ward of deformed babies screaming in a medieval nursery, to name a few. Pretty deep for a three year old, but I definitely came into this life with memories like this.  I don’t know where they came from, but they were always there and were a part of me. As I got older, I would use this source for my stories and tried desperately to connect all of the visions I saw inside.  It is an ongoing endeavor.

Having haunted memories, as I used to call them, never scared me.  It made me more interested in history and events from the past than what most children might involve themselves in.  I believe I can clearly identify a handful of different time periods.  They all occur during a time of great stress and tragic death.  I am a woman, a child, and a soldier.  The greatest and most influential memory deals with a group of harlequins circa the renaissance. The sound of certain types of harpsichord music often sends chills down my spine to this very day, causing me to “remember” some diabolical event from a long forgotten past.  I have been trying to piece that memory together throughout my life.  It was this vision that influenced the original design for my Fool card, back when I was about 9 years old.  It deals with insanity for the sake of being insane!

Another childhood influence in my art and the Deviant Moon were the old insane asylums here on Long Island.  There were three of them in very close proximity to each other, but it was Pilgrim State Asylum that caught my interest growing up.  I would see its looming structures from my window silhouetted against the night sky, the moon hanging malevolently over them.  My parents told me it was “Boogeyman Island”.  My mind would run wild thinking of all the debauchery running wild within its dark brick walls at night.  The asylums were abandoned in the mid 90’s.  I finally had the chance to explore the rotted corridors for the making of the Deviant Moon, taking hundreds of photographs that would later be manipulated into the backdrop of the deck.

Tarot is a True Love and Friend - Interview With Judika Illes

As promised in my post of her Tarot Card Growth Ritual, here's my interview with the warm, intelligent author, independent scholar and spell collector--Judika Illes!

Janet: Hi Judika! To start off, what is your relationship to Tarot? When were you first exposed to the cards?

Judika: I would characterize my relationship with Tarot as true love and true friendship. It is among the longest, most consistent and faithful relationships of my life.

Tarot - Interview With Dark Moor

As Mark told us back in January, Spanish metal band Dark Moor is releasing a new CD titled Tarot which comes out in the U.S. on May 22, 2007.

In the middle of a tour in Spain, Dark Moor took time out of their busy schedule to answer a few of my questions about Tarot and their musical influences:

Janet: Thank you so much for taking some time from your busy tour, guys! To start off who are your musical influences?

Dark Moor: We have a lot of influences. Principally: classic music, with comoposers like Mozart, Bethoveen, Vivaldi, Holst or more actually like Dany Elfman or John Williams. In the rock style we like bands like Queen, Rainbow, Iron Maiden or Helloween.

Janet: When/how did you become acquainted with Tarot cards?

David Sexton's Mystic Arcana

Admit it: just like everyone else, at least once a week, you tie a towel around your shoulders, hang the King of Wands around your neck, and bound around the room pretending to be "The Invincible Taroteer," right? There's no shame in it. We all do it. Ahem.

Anyways, way back in February, Janet Boyer alerted us to the upcoming release of Mystic Arcana -- a mythic, Tarot-themed addition to the Marvel Comics universe that's good news for closet Invincible Taroteers everywhere. In this new interview with Comic Book Resources, creator David Sexton (also the creator of the Tarot of Oz and the Winged Spirit Tarot) details the evolution of the project, reveals the intimate influence Tarot has had on the project's design, and discusses his desire to add a touch of realism to the way magic is used in Marvel Comics.

Interview With Lucy Cavendish - The Oracle Tarot

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Lucy Cavendish, creator of The Oracle Tarot and Magical Spell Cards. Lucy is devoted to making positive magic a part of everyone's life and to helping people rediscover the healing power and pure joy of magical ritual. She is the creator of Witchcraft magazine, which she edited for five years, and has studied magic, myth, and Wicca.

Janet: Hi Lucy! Thanks so much for your time and for creating such a beautiful, positive, and empowering deck--The Oracle Tarot. How were you guided to create this particular deck?

Lucy: I fell in love with the tarot is about 1987. Though I had been attracted to it beforehand, I had been nervous and fearful of using it - some of the images and words made me feel the fear factor. I also have lovely conservative parents (well, they were then - they're not any more!) and as I had experienced so many peculiar things as a child, I did not want to alarm them in any way.

So instead, I read about religion, myths and spirituality, rather than being actively practising, though of course it's unavoidable if you're naturally intuitive. Repressing that natural quality we all have can make you quite ill. Which I became - I suffered a miscarriage and a relationship meltdown and realised I needed to leave everything I knew in order to find myself.

Interview With J. Philip Thomas (Tarot de Paris)

The origin of Tarot de Paris is an amazing tale. Deck creator J. Philip Thomas graciously took the time to answer a few of my questions, as well as sharing some insights into the deck itself. He lives in Maui, Hawaii, and is about to send off the drafts of his upcoming book The Paris Lines.

Janet: Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview. What are your thoughts on Tarot in general?

JPT: Tarot is a tool, one among many others, that can assist those whose need to know supersedes their desire to believe. Also of concern is that I don't restrain the Tarot to the dogma of Christian and Cabalistic traditions. In my insignificant opinion, the Tarot is an idea - not a deck of cards. I view it as moving pictures on a wheel that has never ceased to turn. It is important to note that since Tarot began its current incarnation as an Italian game (or moral flash cards ), there has never been a time when the images, sequences, titles, or meanings, were not undergoing change.

The Archeon Tarot - Interview With Tim Lantz

Janet: Hi Tim! First off, why did you create a Tarot deck?

Tim: To be honest, I didn’t start with the intention of creating a tarot deck. I love symbolism and as I was working on various ideas related to that, I stumbled upon another artist’s attempts at a Tarot. Well, I really didn’t care for what I saw, especially the version of The Moon, and I started thinking, “How would I do that? What would MY version of The Moon look like?”

So, I started with that one card, I made a decent enough stab at it, and that was going to be it. When I showed it to several of my friends, the feedback was amazing. So much encouragement and positive feedback really spurred me on to try a few more.

True Love Tarot - Interview With Amy Zerner

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Amy Zerner, one-half of the magical, creative team known as The Enchanted Couple. Amy, an award-winning collage artist, and her husband Monte, a gifted psychic and writer, design beautiful, user-friendly oracular tools, meditation decks, and mystical kits. In this interview, we chat about Amy and Monte's newest Tarot deck, the True Love Tarot, as well as relationships and intuition.